It’s a familiar refrain that Connie and I are prone to utter: “It feels like a lifetime since we have presented our game shows .” And indeed the month of March 2021 marks a one year milestone – that’s when, in March 2020, the San Francisco Bay Area senior living communities secluded to quarantine, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic shelter in place order.
With that move, we lost much of our customer base. But we lost more than that - we lost that sense of community we relished from the relationships we made over time with seniors at over a dozen different communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
We did gain a new membership as we were now members of a much larger community – the entire world that was in the grips of this relentless virus. Dealing with it brought up important questions for each nation state and its citizens to answer, one of the most compelling being: How do we prioritize human life among a changing set of competing priorities, such as economic livelihoods?
These overarching concerns intermingled as if in a perfect storm with governments that were playing fast and loose with the facts to cater to their base. As authors of The Don't Get Me Started! Toolkit- Strategies for a Culturally-Challenged World - that prizes the principles of critical thinking, emotional intelligence, creativity and flexibility - we started to wonder if along with the movement for ‘alternate facts’ we were now living in an alternate reality where these principles no longer were valued.
As we publish these words on the Net in the last week of April 2021, there are glimmers of hope appearing world-wide that the destructive forces of this pandemic may be on the wane. Signs of optimism – such as increasing travel, reopening of restaurants and stores---sound like a huge exhalation. As if we collectively have been holding our breaths for this moment.
This optimism is partnered with the beginnings of perspective – for the ways we have been forced to cope with loss, with living with uncertainty and for the ways technology has helped and sometimes hindered our sanity during this trying period.
We are starting this blog to in a sense to ‘make sense’ of it all.
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